At Auburn, I had to leard ADA. Talk about useless

..unless you happen to be creating a bomb proof (pardon the pun) real time system for the military, in which case ADA is a) Useful and b) Extremely bloody lucrative! It was a compulsory module in my Real Time Systems degree, mainly because 25% of the graduates from that course went on to write nuclear bomb simulators and so forth for the MoD.

Other reasons for teaching ADA that your professor might have considered compelling include:

a) Demonstration of a P-Code compilation system
b) Extremely strongly typed syntax - I mean NO slacking off
c) Thoroughly defined concurrency model

Personally I hated it - too many words!

Rob